For the past few years, the travel world has been somewhat obsessed with millennials. Hotels and tour companies have been racing to reinvent themselves for the demographic.
Many of the innovations have been great: fast and free Wi-Fi, intuitive tech, in-room workout gear, communal work and social spaces, cool design, locavore restaurants, Instagram-ready tableaus and more adventurous excursions. And it’s hard to disagree with trading old-school frivolities for good sense and good value.
The thing is, many people born before 1980 also want all those things. Some of them require them. But even though the “millennial travel” label doesn’t make sense, the evolution has improved travel.
Like any trend—though, as with multigenerational travel, it’s arguable that tech-, social- and design-driven “millennial travel” offerings aren’t so much a trend but a simply thing that exists—this one is continuing to evolve.
Millennials tend to get a bad rap, perhaps justifiably, for their vain tendencies and near-constant smartphone use—which makes them precisely the perfect judges when it comes to an app’s design.
ComScore’s latest report revealed that the most app-obsessed generation yet will delete an app—no matter how essential, useful, or revolutionary it is—if it’s poorly designed. The annual mobile app report also revealed that Snapchat and Instagram are now neck-and-neck, and that apps like Flipboard, goodreads, and Wattpad are favored as ‘hidden gems.’ Still, the the biggest takeaway is that good design still matters.
“Millennials identify closely with their smartphones, and nearly every aspect of their lives is integrated with it,” Adam Lella, senior marketing analyst at ComScore, told AdAge. “For that reason, the apps on their phone represent who they are. . .many Millennials don’t want it on their phone if they don’t like the way it looks and represents them.”
Some sage advice for app developers: Forget how revolutionary your product is; your app could facilitate time travel, or maybe even cure cancer, but if it doesn’t look cool, millennials will delete it. Does that make them shallow and image-obsessed, or design-conscious with a good eye? We’ll let you decide. From Architectural Digest.
